A place to share struggles and triumphs, a place to bless and serve - but never a place to murmur or complain. 

Thursday, June 11, 2009

That's what Mother Teresa said.

Love does not measure; it just gives.

We can do no great things; only small things with great love.

Little things are indeed little, but to be faithful in little things is a great thing.

I want you to be concerned about your next door neighbor. Do you know your next door neighbor? 

Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.

We need to find God, and God cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature--trees and flowers and grass--grow in silence. See the stars, the moon, and the sun, how they move in silence. The more we receive in silent prayer, the more we can give in our active life.

There is a terrible hunger for love. We all experience that in our lives - the pain, the loneliness. We must have the courage to recognize it. The poor you may have right in your own family. Find them. Love them.

Before you speak, it is necessary for you to listen, for God speaks in the silence of the heart.

Do not think that love, in order to be genuine, has to be extraordinary. What we need is to love without getting tired.

I do not pray for success, I ask for faithfulness.

Give yourself fully to God. He will use you to accomplish great things on the condition that you believe much more in His love than in your own weakness.

If you judge people, you have no time to love them.

Speak tenderly to them. Let there be kindness in your face, in your eyes, in your smile, in the warmth of your greeting. Always have a cheerful smile. Don't only give your care, but give your heart as well.

I know God will not give me anything I can't handle. I just wish that He didn't trust me so much. 

The more you have, the more you are occupied, the less you give. But the less you have the more free you are. Poverty for us is a freedom. It is not mortification, a penance. It is joyful freedom. There is no television here, no this, no that. But we are perfectly happy. 

I pray that you will understand the words of Jesus, “Love one another as I have loved you.” Ask yourself “How has he loved me? Do I really love others in the same way?” Unless this love is among us, we can kill ourselves with work and it will only be work, not love. Work without love is slavery.

A sacrifice to be real must cost, must hurt, must empty ourselves. The fruit of silence is prayer, the fruit of prayer is faith, the fruit of faith is love, the fruit of love is service, the fruit of service is peace. 

When once a chairman of a multinational company came to see me, to offer me a property in Bombay, he first asked: “Mother, how do you manage your budget?" I asked him who had sent him here. He replied: ‘I felt an urge inside me.’ I said: other people like you come to see me and say the same. It was clear God sent you, Mr. A, as He sends Mr. X, Mrs. Y, Miss Z, and they provide the material means we need for our work. The grace of God is what moved you. You are my budget. God sees to our needs, as Jesus promised. I accepted the property he gave and named it Asha Dan (Gift of Hope).

Like Jesus we belong to the world living not for ourselves but for others. The joy of the Lord is our strength.

There is only one God and He is God to all; therefore it is important that everyone is seen as equal before God. I’ve always said we should help a Hindu become a better Hindu, a Muslim become a better Muslim, a Catholic become a better Catholic. We believe our work should be our example to people.

When a poor person dies of hunger, it has not happened because God did not take care of him or her. It has happened because neither you nor I wanted to give that person what he or she needed.

We have to share with our people. Suffering today is because people are hoarding, not giving, not sharing. Jesus made it very clear. Whatever you do to the least of my brethren, you do it to me. Give a glass of water, you give it to me. Receive a little child, you receive me.

Everybody today seems to be in such a terrible rush, anxious for greater developments and greater riches and so on, so that children have very little time for their parents. Parents have very little time for each other, and in the home begins the disruption of peace of the world.

If we really want to love we must learn how to forgive..

There is no greater sickness in the world today than the lack of love. 

God loves a cheerful giver. She or he gives best who gives with a smile. 

The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread. 

Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.

God made the world rich enough to feed and clothe all human beings. 

Pride destroys everything. To imitate Jesus is the key to be meek and humble in heart. 

People who love each other fully and truly are the happiest people in the world. They may have little, they may have nothing, but they are happy people. Everything depends on how we love one another.

When I was crossing into Gaza, I was asked at the checkpost whether I was carrying any weapons. I replied: Oh yes, my prayer books.

If you have a sick or lonely person at home, be there. Maybe just to hold a hand, maybe just to give a smile, that is the greatest, the most beautiful work.

Prayer gives us a pure heart and a pure heart can do much.

Keep your heart pure. A pure heart is necessary to see God in each other. If you see God in each other, there is love for each other, then there is peace.

The poor do not need our sympathy and our pity. The poor need our love and compassion.

I don't know what God is doing. He knows.We do not understand, but of one thing I'm sure, He doesn't make a mistake.

God has created us to love and to be loved, and this is the beginning of prayer--to know that he loves me, that I have been created for greater things.

The joy of Jesus will be my strength--it will be in my heart. Every person I meet will see it in my work, my walk, my prayer--in everything.

Keep the light of Christ always shining in your hearts. Only He is the Way to be trodden. He is the Truth we must speak out. He is the Love we must love.

Faith in action is love, and love in action is service. By transforming that faith into living acts of love, we put ourselves in contact with God Himself, with Jesus our Lord.

Christ is hidden under the suffering appearance of anyone who is hungry, naked, homeless, or dying.

People are hungry for God. Do you see that? Quite often we look but do not see. We are all passing through this world. We need to open our eyes and see.

We must convert our love for Christ into deeds. We must express Christian love in concrete, living ways.

Let us bring love and compassion to win the world, to bring the world the gospel of Christ. 

Let us all bring the good news that God loves the world!

You who have received so much love, share it with others. Love others the way that God has loved you, with tenderness.

My prayer for you is that you come to understand and have the courage to answer Jesus' call to you with the simple word 'yes'.

A clean heart is a free heart. A free heart can love Christ with an undivided love in chastity, convinced that nothing and nobody will separate it from his love.

Friday, June 5, 2009

Prayer

For a few years I had been having a soft, but persistent feeling that I needed to work on the sincerity of my prayers. My husband sometimes likes to tease me about my morning prayer which generally lasts quite a long time…he says, “well you certainly look angelic, but I don’t know how much of that is due to prayer and how much to drifting in and out of peaceful slumber…”

Then one day I was preparing to give a talk at a Friday Forum and I was pretty proud of how I had organized the principle of joy into this neat little packaged equation. I was telling a very spiritual friend I have in the other ward about how it was so easy….if you keep commandments, pray, and do this and this,,,then you get the gift of joy. And she said “Wonderful! You have just described the letter of the law…now let me tell you about the spirit of the law. And she taught me that some people are going through all the motions, obeying the commandments…yet still they are not experiencing joy….the reason is, that it’s not just a matter of the acts…it is also a matter of the heart….and the acts are just a preparation to a change of heart.

Then she told me about her prayer experiences and her prayer journal. She said that sometimes she could almost feel her prayers ascending to the throne of God and feel Him reaching down to her. She was having these beautiful prayer experiences where she and Heavenly Father were partners in bringing great works to pass in her life and the lives of others.

I have had that experience a few times, but rarely, and I didn’t know why it happened when it happened…Most of the time I had been going through all the motions and not experiencing real and powerful prayer…I wanted that experience. I decided to experiment to find out just what was required in order to gain experiences like my friend.

My first tries were mostly failures. I tried more intensity, more desire, concentrating harder…all acts that didn’t work. After several months of failed experiments I began to get discouraged.

But then one day, quite by accident, something happened. A friend had emailed me a video of “Oh Holy Night that was sung along with pictures of the Nativity. And when I watched that something overcame me and the spirit was so strong that I was driven to my knees in awe and wonder and gratitude for the atonement and a desire that all men should be able to feel the love of God. During that prayer I realized that I was having the type of experience my friend described. And so I asked the Lord, “How is it done?’ I had to ponder it for several weeks before I figured out the answer.

Then I finally realized what my friend had been trying to teach me about prayer. It is not just a matter of the words or the acts…it is a matter of the heart.

What was different about that prayer, than all my other prayers when I hadn’t had that experience? It was the Spirit.

1. I had prepared before hand to feel the Spirit.
2. The spirit was present during the prayer.
3. I had allowed the spirit to enter my heart, and the spirit made my heart become unified with the Lord, It filled me with a powerful Love of God and Also Love of my fellow man….and an intense gratitude for the atonement….and thus instead of me rattling off a list of my needs and hoping somebody would hear….it became a sacred partnership…my will and the Lord’s will suddenly unified, and the prayer became powerful in a way that I had not felt in a long time.

Then I realized that preparing before, during, and after prayer to have the spirit present in order to make my heart and will one with Gods, is the way to meaningful and powerful prayer.
Elder Russell M. Nelson confirmed that having the spirit present is the true order of prayer….He said, “Jesus taught us how to pray. We pray to our Heavenly Father, in the name of Jesus Christ, by the power of the Holy Ghost. This is the ‘true order of prayer’.”

I don't have time to prepare for prayer and have these experiences every day. But I have been trying to do it more. And it has made all the difference.